Autumn Moon: Artistry

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and today we're going to be learning some specific ways that you can play "Autumn Moon" with artistry. Let's check out the score to get started. Let's start by talking about pedaling. As you get to more advanced sheet music, it's more and more common to have the composer not show you all the places to do up-downs with the pedal. It will just say something like "with pedal," or sometimes they won't even say "with pedal" at all, it will just be obvious to you because of the style of the piece that it needs pedal. And as you get more mature in your playing, and get more familiar with different styles of music, you'll learn when it's appropriate to use pedal and when it's not. But in this case, I went ahead and told you "with pedal," but then I didn't give you any of the pedal markings because I'd like you to start learning to figure those out for yourself, but let's do some of that together now. One of the basic guidelines of pedaling, is you change the pedal when the harmony or the chord changes. So, here we start with an E minor chord, and because these notes are pickup notes, I'm going to choose not to pedal those notes, because if I pedal them, hear how that creates a bit of a blur from the E to the F-sharp. Those two notes together create a dissonance, so I'm going to not pedal those two notes, but I will put my pedal down on this first chord. So pedal down, which we mark like this. Actually, let me use a different color so it doesn't conflict with that underline I just did. and then we'll do an up-down every time the chord changes, which is pretty easy to see in the left hand. The left hand is in charge of the harmonies or the chords in this piece. So it will pretty much follow what the left hand is doing. So we'll go down pedal here. Up-down up-down up-down Okay, and then that pattern can continue. Now, some people may choose to lift the petal here to create this rest, but I found you can leave the pedal down sometimes through a rest if it creates the effect you're looking for. Technically, if we wanted the rest in its purity, we'd need to lift the pedal, but I kind of like leaving that down because it creates a more magical, mystical sound, which i think is appropriate for this piece and its style. And then going on, every time the left hand chord changes, we'll do an up-down. I don't need to do this through the whole piece because this left hand pattern is so consistent throughout. Let's review a little bit of pedaling technique. Here in measure three, I'd like you to do left hand alone with damper pedal. So you'll have up-down, up-down up-down up-down You're listening for a legato sound with no blur. up-down If I lift the pedal early, it will sound like this: Did you hear that gap? That tells me my pedal was early. If it's late, or I forget to do it at all, you'll get that blur okay? Make sure the timing is just right. up-down. The up comes as you play your finger 5, up-down. Pause the video and work on damper pedal timing with left hand alone in measures three through six, and then press play to go on. The only place that I think needs special attention for pedaling, is right here. Remember where we have this one slurred pair of notes while the other notes are all tied. So we're going to do up-downs with each chord change in the left hand, but then here, because this G to F-sharp can create a dissonance. Which I think is nice to resolve that dissonance in this case, which means we've got to do another up-down even though we're really only changing that one note. Notice here, we'll do an up-down on this chord, up-down, and then up-down, and that gives us a perfect beautiful consonance, and resolves that dissonance created by the G. For playing with artistry of course, the pedal is very important. Another thing that's really important to pay attention to are any expressive markings. "Freely" is a composer's clue that you can take a lot of liberty with the beat, and a little bit of liberty with the rhythms, but mostly you can take a flexible approach. So instead of thinking like a metronome is playing along with you. That would be very march-like, but freely implies you can take a more relaxed approach to the rhythms. 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3-e-&-a 4-e-&-a, 1-e-&-a 2-e-&-a 3, see how I kind of slowed down a little bit there? Because it says freely, you're free to take some liberties. And maybe take a little bit of time as you come into that fermata, then a composer's clue to like not be so free and be a little bit more regular and flowing, is this "a tempo" that says go back to normal people. Regular speed. And then this is one of my favorite music terms: Cantabile. Try saying that. Cantabile. Cantabile is an Italian word that means the music and the melody should sing like a song. How do you get a cantabile tone? Well I think it comes down to voicing and phrasing. If you play with beautiful voicing and beautiful phrasing, which we've talked a lot about in past lessons, you know, don't make every note sound the same. is so boring, but if you go: Make some notes softer. It's going to come to a climax, and then get softer again. Most phrases have a shape like that. See how even inside one ...